Politics

Obama's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Year

America’s health-care morass is now entwined with the president’s credibility crisis, and neither shows any signs of abating.

Documents released last week by the House Energy and Commerce Committee once again demonstrate the administration knew that the Obamacare signup system was a disaster in the making but still had the audacity to roll it out. Two late September emails from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) tell the story.

A September 26 email stated, “the results are not good and not consistent at all.” A September 27 email likewise depicted pending failure: “The scripts are failing so far due to issues like load balancing, inefficient and defective code, and inefficient queries. We have not been successful in moving beyond 500 concurrent users filling applications without income verification.”

As Bob Schieffer put it on Sunday, “every day there just seems to be some new mind boggling development about the problems with Obamacare . . . There’s now evidence that people in the White House, including the President, were briefed months before the program started that there were some flaws here.”

Yet only earlier this month, Obama told Americans, “We would not have rolled out something knowing very well that it wasn’t going to work the way it was supposed to, given all the scrutiny that we knew was going to be on the website.” Really?

Obama’s credibility is in free fall as the gap between presidential rhetoric and realitygrows ever greater. Americans are already living through Obama’s promise that “if you like your current insurance, you keep that insurance.” Now, we are about to find out that “No matter how we reform health care. . .we will keep this promise: if you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period,” was at best wishful thinking, and outright deception at worst.

Not surprisingly, America is losing patience with Obamacare and Obama. Support for Obamacare steadily leaches out, with nearly three in five Americans now opposing the President's eponymous achievement. Can you really blame House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for saying that she always called Obamacare the Affordable Care Act? Failure is an orphan.

But even more damaging than the public’s loss of confidence in Obamacare is America’s growing distrust of the President’s integrity and competence. Half the country thinks of him as less than truthful. Obama’s approval rating is 40 percent, his disapproval is 55 percent, and his base is unhappy.

Women (53 percent) and suburbanites (58 percent) now disapprove of him, according to the latest CNN poll. To put things in context, Obama won 55 percent of the women’s vote and captured America’s suburbs, as he bested Mitt Romney. If the presidential election were held today, a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll reported that Romney would have his revenge. Clearly, 2013 is Obama’s annus horribilis, his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year.